Hi, On Thu, Feb 06, 2020 at 07:24:28PM +0100, Ansgar wrote:
[popcon is not indicative of install base] > That's likely given some libreoffice packages (unlikely to be installed > on servers) are at ~40% popcon and I would expect significantly more > server installations than desktop ones. > So popcon might overestimate sysvinit usage and it might in reality be > lower over the total installation base. Also quite possible. That's my point: we do not have useful data on deployments because desktops are more likely to report in, container builders are more likely to repeatedly download the same package in rapid succession, container users will often not download an init system from the mirror network at all because it is in the base images, datacenter operators will certainly run their own mirrors, embedded systems are deployed via dd'ing images, company-wide FAI rollouts almost certainly disable popcon, containers use the service as the entry point and skip the init system, dependencies might pull in packages that go unused, ... That is what I'm saying: these numbers have more noise than signal in them, especially for the init systems. The numbers are very useful for comparing packages within a suite, e.g. GNOME Terminal vs GNOME Minesweeper, which is why we use them to distribute packages over the installation media, but I wouldn't even trust them to get the ratio of GNOME vs KDE installations right. If we wanted to get more accurate statistics, we'd have to at least distinguish between bare metal, VMs, and containers on one axis, and manual installation by the user, default installation by d-i or automated installation through a configuration management tool, and then we'd still have to correct for the fact that packages installed by default will not usually be manually installed. We'd have slightly more accurate numbers that would still give anyone without a relevant doctorate pretty much nothing to work with, and it would be a lot of effort, so let's not. tl;dr: statistics is hard, please do not base decisions on popcon or downloads. Simon
